Miss Reed, pursuing her advantage: “I don’t know it from you, Nettie. I’ve tried and tried to pass it off as a joke, and to treat it as something funny; but I can tell you it’s no joke at all.”
Miss Spaulding, sympathetically: “I see, dear.”
Miss Reed: “It’s not that I care for him”—
Miss Spaulding: “Why, of course.”
Miss Reed: “For I don’t in the least. He is horrid every way: blunt, and rude, and horrid. I never cared for him. But I care for myself! He has put me in the position of having done an unkind thing—an unladylike thing—when I was only doing what I had to do. Why need he have taken it the way he did? Why couldn’t he have said politely that he couldn’t accept the money because he hadn’t earned it? Even that would have been mortifying enough. But he must go and be so violent, and rush off, and—Oh, I never could have treated anybody so!”
Miss Spaulding: “Not unless you were very fond of them.”
Miss Reed: “What?”
Miss Spaulding: “Not unless you were very fond of them.”
Miss Reed, putting away her handkerchief: “Oh, nonsense, Nettie! He never cared anything for me, or he couldn’t have acted so. But no matter for that. He has fixed everything so that it can never be got straight—never in the world. It will just have to remain a hideous mass of—of—I don’t know what; and I have simply got to on withering with despair at the point where I left off. But I don’t care! That’s one comfort.”
Miss Spaulding: “I don’t believe he’ll let you wither long, Ethel.”